wtf: can’t sleep, London Olympics mascots will kill me

are based on a short story by children’s author Michael Morpurgo that tells how they were fashioned from droplets of the steel used to build the Olympic stadium.

They’re called Wenlock and Mandeville, though I suspect even their mother can’t remember which one is which. From the Guardian:

Wenlock, named after the Shropshire town of Much Wenlock that helped inspire Pierre de Coubertin to launch the modern Olympics, and Mandeville, inspired by the Buckinghamshire town of Stoke Mandeville, where the Paralympics were founded, will become very familiar in the next two years. The chairman of the London organising committee of the Olympic games (Locog), Lord Coe, said the mascots were aimed squarely at children and designed with the digital age in mind. He said they had the most positive reaction in workshops to road test them.

Yeah, well, clowns are aimed squarely at children, too, and no one is stopping clowns from eating our brains while we sleep.

And you. Will. Not. Be. Able. To. Escape. Them:

They will become a range of up to 30 cuddly toys, including versions based on celebrities and sports stars, as well as adorning badges, T-shirts, mugs and more.

Reader Paul, who sent me the photo, thinks they look like Doctor Who monsters. I can see that, if it’s a monster whose evil consciousness is too big for just one body, and so it is divided into two hideous corporeal forms that each have one giant eye and yet see together, all the better to plot how to take over the universe by riveting us all in unutterable horror till we all simply die of thirst.

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Ah, the creative industries of London: specialists in grossly overpriced bullshit. I can’t help but be reminded of a friend in my north of England hometown who, on hearing I’d visited the Millennium Dome, commented: “I’ve heard it’s middle-class wank.”

Me thinks the designers behind these one eyed monsters had been watching to much “Monsters Inc”!

Kathryn

I’m going to watch Carmen at the former Millennium Dome this evening. It may have been a terrible middle-class wank of an idea back in 1999 but it’s doing rather well as a venue now. Though it’d be even better if the Jubilee line didn’t have so much engineering work on!